Containers vs Virtualization or Containers + Virtualiztion?

Jun 9, 2014 • Jonathan Frappier

Containers have been a hot topic of late, many are suggesting it is the next step in the virtualization evolution and spells doom for vSphere, Hyper-V or other “traditional” virtualization platforms. For those who are not aware of containers, its is a packaged application that can run isolated from other applications. It is not too dissimilar from ThinApps in a virtual desktop environment but focused on server applications such as Apache, Tomcat or other custom applications on top of a single Operating System.

Some, such as Linux Journal suggest it is the future and that traditional OS level virtualization and the hypervisor is not needed. With containers, you could remove the hypervisor layer and run your OS directly on baremetal and run the “virtualized” applications helping to save resources (including budget).

My question is, why does it have to be Containers versus Virtualization? Why can’t it be a marriage of the two technologies to offer the best of each?

With this model, you can still isolate and manage resources at the OS level which has been proven over and over again as well as drop containers on top of the virtualized OS? Not only can I still leverage hypervisor features such as high availability, but I can reduce the number of VM’s needed by adding more containers to a single VM. Scale up resources when needed for adding containers OR scale out resources when needed for redundancy or additional throughput? What are your thoughts?

Why, well because you don’t always have VMware Workstation or Fusion available, and VMware Player only let’s you do so much. Sometimes you just need to make due with VirtualBox. Be warned, however, ESXi has been quite unstable for me in VirtualBox, especially if trying to add new hardware. The build below was fairly stable until I tried to add a new virtual hard drive, now it PSODs on boot. Plan ahead and add all necessary hardware prior to ESXi installation.

Just a heads up to anyone looking to deploy vCAC using vSphere SSO instead of the vCAC SSO appliance, in 5.5.0 U1, U1a, and U1b you will have problems adding tenants or new users. The fix is to replace a JAR file which can be found at the link below along with a more detailed description of the error and solution. I ran up against this recently, and if it weren’t for another error I’m troubleshooting to bring my vCAC SQL server online I’d verify if it works.